Dos Cabezas

Dos Cabezas (the "Two Heads") sits prominently above the Willcox Playa in Cochise County, Arizona. The peak itself is on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, but access is barred by a patchwork of private land, most of which is owned by one family. Connections get you places in life, and they propelled me to the top of this peak as well.

Getting There

Take the Willcox exit off of Interstate 10 onto SR 186 toward the community of Dos Cabezas. If you have the gate key, head up the Mascot Mine Road and follow the directions provided by the landowner. If you have no key, previous hikers have parked at or near the Dos Cabezas Cemetery and cross-country hiked over to the Mascot Mine Road via BLM land. Either route still requires some traverse of private land, so if you don't have permission, proceed at your own risk.

The Route

Having the permission to drive up to the high saddle shortens the hike significantly. It drops from an over ten mile, 3,000ft hike down to a measly 2.4 miles and just under 1,400ft of gain. Thus, I'm only going to talk about the 2.4 mile portion because I cannot speak to the other 7.6 miles.

GPS track of Dos Cabezas from the high saddle. The 'Radio Facility' is Iron Tower.

The high saddle is a very convenient place to start the hike. It is quite flat and would also be a good place to camp. The saddle itself is on BLM land, so no issues with camping. Immediately in front of you is a ridge line straight up to Iron Tower (a knoll with a radio antenna on top). There is an old fenceline you can follow all the way to the tower itself. From there, follow the top of the ridgeline toward the summit block. Once at the base of the summit block, follow the ramp up toward the north of the block around to where there is a clear Class 2 chute to the final two short Class 3 moves to get on top.

Elevation vs. Distance

Elevation vs. Time

Here, please, take my poorly annotated drawing of the ramp and chute (dotted = the route is hidden behind rock):

Professional-level drawing of the suggested route up the summit block

The Trip

Monday Morning

Waking up at my desert camp near Mae West Peaks, my only plan was to get up to the high saddle on Dos Cabezas and camp. My intention was to hike the peak on Tuesday and have rest of the day for travel. It was a slow morning because of this and I was on the road around 10am.

My first order of business once arriving in Willcox was to retrieve the gate key from the landowner. My roommate's grandfather has family ties to the Dos Cabezas area and knows the landowner. He was able and willing to set me up with him so my hike was shorter. I had called the landowner a week or so before my trip to discuss the situation, and we had agreed I would meet him at his place of business Monday afternoon.

I arrived around lunchtime and checked in at the front office. After looking on OnX, it seems he owns a majority of the land around Willcox (and also some land out by Mae West). After a call from his receptionist, he met me with a liability waiver to sign. He was a fairly gruff individual, but friendly enough. He provided me with a run down of what to expect on the road and how to get to where I was going, as well as an overview of the hiking route I should take. I asked about a potential water source, and he said I could take from his spring to refill my stores (they were getting a bit low after a few days of hiking). He asked me not to disseminate his information as he likes to limit the number of people cruising his road. I learned later he also greatly dislikes hunters. In any case, don't ask me for his info; my lips are sealed.

It was during this exchange that the topic of coming weather was brought up. Monday night it was supposed to rain a fairly decent amount. I wondered in my head if it would be better to bang out the hike this afternoon then head down before the dirt road got all muddy and impassable on Tuesday morning. I hadn't decided what I wanted to do there yet, but I did know I needed food. I went back into town to La Unica Mexican Restaurant where I ate a pretty good California burrito and spent a bit relaxing and perusing Peakbagger (as one does when bored).

Monday Afternoon

Having spent enough time watching the winds pick up outside, I got back into the truck and moved on toward Mascot Mine Road. Turning up the dirt road, it's only about a quarter mile before you come to the first gate (the one you need the key for). It's red and has a large padlock inside a welded protective box that you kind of have to jimmy around before you're able to get the key in.

After the gate is a fairly standard but rocky dirt road that follows one of the drainages up. A few miles in you hit another gate, this one needing a code (provided to me earlier in the day). Typing in the code automatically opens the gate and closes it behind you.

The next section of road has a couple interesting points. First, you pass a number of abandoned mineshafts. Multiple of these have large iron doors sealing them and are pretty ominous. Next, the road climbs up out of the canyon to where the guy and his wife actually live. Pretty remote and I could not imagine having to drive this bumpy of a road to get to/from home every day. After you pass his house, you come to a switchback with a ton of lush grass and some black plastic pipes protruding from the ground. These pipes spit out the water from the spring he said I could use and are surrounded by cow dung, so I was skeptical the water would be fine.

Past this, the road narrows and continues to climb up. He had told me they'd recently graded the road, and it made such a difference! The graded sections were smooth and nice driving (other than one spot a boulder had rolled onto the road so I had to toss it off the side). Multiple vistas along this road allow for an up close view of Dos Cabezas, one of which is the banner image for this post.

It was around 1:30pm when I reached the high saddle. By this time, the winds were high, maybe 15mph or so, and the sky was darkening slightly. After coming to the conclusion that I could do this in the couple hours before sunset, I set off post-haste. Immediately, I deviated from the landowner's suggested route and started following the wrong fenceline. I caught this error quickly, but you can still see the blip on my GPS track so no hiding my mistake.

Straight up the rocky and bushy hillside toward Iron Tower I marched. Nothing too exciting in this first trundle, just a steep bugger and every now and then deviating to find a path around some brush. I was buzzed by a pair of A-10 Warthogs, which I could only assume are using the military range on the Willcox Playa for training, but who knows.

One of the A-10s intruding on my wilderness experience

Once reaching Iron Tower, I was greeted by slightly stronger winds. The area around the tower is nice, very meadowy and would be a nice tent camping spot in another life. The tower itself was creaking and groaning in the wind, but I told myself if the tower has been up this long, it'll stay up another couple hours for my visit and wouldn't crash down on my head. I did stop at one of the tower's guy lines though. Banging my pole on the cable made a very satisfying noise, not unlike the laser bolts from a Star Wars blaster.

Iron Tower - aptly named

One of the beautiful meadows before the nasty brush, featuring the destination in back

After telling Belle to stop playing around with the guy line, we continued on our way. The ridgeline push to the base of the summit block is nasty. So many dense oak and whatever other stick-based bushes covered the ridge that it was a fight to get through. Halfway along, I gave up on my trekking poles and left them hanging on a branch, pledging that I would return soon. Belle had no problem with this section; pros of being a foot and a half tall I guess.

Upon reaching the base of the south head, I decided that Belle had to stay behind. I had seen the condition of the ramp and scramble from below, and I didn't want to deal with roping her up when time was of the essence. Weather continued to move in and I could feel the pressure dropping rapidly. I chose a suitably strong-looking tree and tied her up to it. My pack also got shorn off here since it was unnecessary for the remaining short bit.

The final push - intimidating if you don't know there's an easy way

The ramp is easy to find, but I did get tripped up with how far along it you're supposed to go. It curves from the south side of the cliff face around to the west side. I had moved along it to the point where it looked like it ended (it looked like if I went up one more level I would cliff out).

A look at the ledge - don't tell mom!

At this stopping point, there was a clearly Class 4 or higher route up, and I knew something had gone wrong. Reports told of a max Class 3 route, not the technical route in front of me. After some deliberation I finally went over to what I thought was the edge. This revealed that in the ramp did in fact continue on. A few feet further and boom, I was at the bottom of a beautiful Class 2 chute right up to the base of the small Class 3 obstacle.

The final God-given chute to the top (looking straight up essentially - it's steep)

There are two spots I'd consider Class 3 right here. First is the move under and then on top of a boulder wedged between two rock walls. The second is a short, maybe ten foot, climb with good holds right after the wedged boulder.

A poorly exposed photo of the wedged rock obstacle

This second section gets you right on top where your first view is of a slab that has had many a name carved into it with a history going back decades. Moving around to the south side of the summit, you'll find a wooden stake driven into a rock pile with the register at its base. Much to my dismay, I discovered that the north head is the one with the USGS survey marker. Curse you, USGS, for not knowing which head was higher back when you set the marker! With the weather coming in, there was no time to make an attempt on the arguably harder to reach Cabeza.

A rare image of me remembering to photograph myself. Note the North Cabeza in the back.

As I was signing the register, a few fat drops of rain descended on the peak. Time to go. A few quick photos, and then I crawled my way down the Class 3, down the ramp, and back to my puppy and pack. In my absence, she had successfully wound the tether around the tree enough times to where she could only move about a foot. Great work there, mutt. I unwound her, donned the pack, and continued on to collect my poles.

The imminent storm forming

The rain hadn't continued on beyond the few drops I had felt thankfully, so the hike back to the vehicle was uneventful. In my initial planning for this day (what was originally Tuesday), I had also considered bagging the Dos Cabezas Wilderness high point, Cooper Peak, which was across the saddle (though a little bit longer of a hike than Dos Cabezas). No one had done it from this side, but also not many people had the advantage of being 80% of the way up the mountain and I thought it would be good to knock another one off the Arizona Wilderness High Points list. But alas, plans never stay the same and I needed to get down off this flash flood-prone mountain if it was going to rain.

So close, yet so far! The truck is right above the bushes on the bottom left - just a silver dot! See Cooper Peak in the back too.

The hill flattened and the truck appeared in my vision around 4:15pm. Plenty of daylight left to drive down and find a campsite somewhere on my way to Alpine, AZ. I paused for a few minutes at the spring described previously. The water tasted fine, and that was good enough for me. I took a look in one of the mineshafts next to the water source and found that it still had a broken cart and some equipment in it, but I got skittish and went back to the car without trying to see any deeper. Creepy dark manmade caves are not my strong suit.

The spring I was allowed to fill my stores from

The mineshaft with random equipment - I'm sure the boogeyman was in there somewhere

Down the road I rolled without coming into any other troubles or interesting things. I arranged via phone with the landowner to drop his key in a secure location since his business was now closed and I wouldn't be around on Tuesday to drop it off like originally planned, after which I moved on down the highway back toward Willcox.

A final look back at Dos Cabezas as I descend the Mascot Mine Road

Monday Evening

While filling up with gas at the Love's in town (my favorite gas station - 10 cents off when I give them my phone number to sell!), I looked back at the Two Heads to see that they had since disappeared in a nasty looking storm cloud. Thank goodness I had done the hike and gotten out of there when I did.

I picked up some KFC in the gas station across the street from Love's then proceeded down I-10 East to Hwy 191. It was getting significantly darker now, and I needed to find a campsite quickly. US-191 heads north past the east side of the Pinaleño Mountains and Mount Graham. Mount Graham has an access road that closes every winter, so it has eluded me every time I would've been able to bag it. One day.

I pulled off onto Tanque Road which, after passing through a short section of state land, enters BLM again. BLM is great in that I never have to worry about whether dispersed camping is allowed; it's easier to count the very few spots camping isn't allowed on BLM land. Where this area sits is known as the San Simon Valley and since it lies in the shadow of one of the higher ranges in Arizona, it is (except for this night) extremely dry. I didn't visit, but there is an OHV area called Hot Well Dunes that is fairly popular; the name gives it away, but there are lots of sand dunes in that area as well as some hot springs. Maybe I'll come back to take a gander at a later date.

The last glimmer of light was disappearing over Mount Graham as I sped along trying to find a suitable pullout. This dirt road was really well maintained, and I was able to cruise a number of miles quickly until I found a side road with an intersection large enough for me to get off the main road and not block the side one.

My truck looking like one of those stormchasing rigs in the bleak weather

I hopped out of the truck to take a whizz in the bushes, but realized I was about to water a random USGS survey marker! Why there was one here at this specific point in the flat desert, I had no clue. Consolation prize for not getting the one on Dos Cabezas I suppose. The next morning I found the reference marks as well, just for fun.

Mt Graham shrouded in clouds

A look toward Safford to the north. Note Morenci on the right in the hills.

Back to the present, the storm was moving ever closer and winds were ever faster. I retired to the truck bed and tried not to think of how the bolt above my face for the roof rail wasn't completely sealed and leaked water (I woke up to a wet pillow, but wasn't awoken by the water dripping on me). I was now a day ahead of my intended schedule and glad that I was. Dos Cabezas had been the only thing in my trip I had to specifically plan around (because of the key), so from here it was smooth sailing. Or so I thought...but that remains for another post!